


here we lie (on the eve of what could have been)

by crownlessliestheking



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Character Death, F/M, Sadness, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-08
Updated: 2015-04-08
Packaged: 2018-03-21 20:51:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3704517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crownlessliestheking/pseuds/crownlessliestheking
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tauriel fades fast under the mountain, upon the gravestone that will never see the starlight, and memories of what was turn to dreams of what could have been.</p>
            </blockquote>





	here we lie (on the eve of what could have been)

**Author's Note:**

> Don't mind me, just flexing my angst fingers here. After searching for a suitable song to put in the lyrics there, I have concluded that All of the Stars (the one I ended up choosing) is the perfect song for Kiliel. 
> 
> ~K

 

 _I saw a shooting star_  
_And thought of you_  
 _I sang a lullaby_  
 _By the waterside and knew_  
 _If you were here,_  
 _I'd sing to you_

_(All of the Stars, Ed Sheeran)_

Tauriel is the only elf under the mountain, the only one allowed to remain for the burials of the King and Princes, perhaps because she is one of two outsiders that could know the Company’s grief, though they themselves are drowning in it, blinded by its all-consuming pain; they lay themselves bare for the vultures to pick at their hearts, and Tauriel joins them, offering up all that she is and all that she will ever be in a song that floats over the mountain, melancholy’s melodious notes sinking into the cracks and crevasses that her love died for, yet creating new ones in her shattered heart.

She thinks, as a Dwarrow with an ashen beard recites words she cannot understand to the assembled crowd, that she is only here by grace of the Halfling, Bilbo Baggins, and the toymaker Bofur who grips his brother’s hand so tightly that he is white-knuckled, though his eyes hold a painful mixture of grief and relief-grief, because the losses were uncountable. Relief, because it wasn’t him.

Bilbo Baggins is the only one that could come close to understanding her particular grief, she realizes as she watches the Hobbit crumple onto the Mountain King’s tomb of stone and crystal, his mien forever preserved in harsh stone-but stone cannot provide the warmth, the life, that Bilbo Baggins (and Tauriel and countless others) want to will into those that lie within. No matter what the Dwarrows say, stone is but a dead thing, cold and remote-and she chokes back a sob as she realizes that is what _he_ said to her, peering up with eyes dark and earnest from the inside of a cell that seemed too small for him though it was built with those easily twice his size in mind.

She thinks that perhaps she could have made him see differently, made him open his eyes and truly see them; the stars were the only constant thing in the life of an elf-thousands of years could go by, and yet they would remain, and elves would be slain in battle, or Fade entirely (just as Tauriel knew she was doing), and still they would remain. They would remain, and within their light, more beautiful than mithril, softer than moonlight and more distant than the sun, was memory of everything they had witnessed, the confessions she and a thousand others had whispered to their heights, secret words borne on a quiet night’s breeze forever upwards. Starlight, the Wood Elves of the Mirkwood treasured above all else, for the starlight was as unchangeable as they wished their realm could be, utterly incorruptible, flawless jewels set in the ever-changing tapestry of the world to watch and warn and remember.

She thinks that perhaps he would have said the same about stone.

(Days pass.

Eat, please, a whispered plea, and a slow shake of her head in refusal.

He would not want this.

She does not-cannot-live without him.

Silence.)

The darkness surrounds her, though the Arkenstone shines bright upon the breast of the King Under the Mountain, its heart resting with its rightful ruler, and there is a certain odd symmetry to that which some part of her appreciates.

It shines bright, like a star.

Tauriel has long come to terms with the fact that it is the closest thing to a star that she will see before she Fades for good.

It washes against her like a tide upon the soft sand of a beach already eroded by time, there is nothing left for her. She believes that Thranduil has told Legolas that she is dead, fallen in battle, and she finds herself grateful for it, though it is an empty, hollow gratitude.

(She does not feel much of anything, these days).

If he had known, she could not stand his mixed pity and disgust and attempts to understand and get her back; she could not stand the way she knew he would try to change her back into who she had been, try to erase history, erase _him_ from her life. So little they had known each other, yet she knows that she would have spent every day with him, from then until the stars finally dimmed and the moon’s lamp grew rusted and twisted and the sun fell from the sky to its watery doom. She knows that she will die here in the darkness, for when he died, the stars did dim, and she found that she could no longer gaze upon them, for their patterns spelt his name, held his smile and his bow, sparkled like the life in his eyes.

Yes, they were memory, but memory was painful, her wound too raw to bear it, her tears rivers carving canyons of her face, her voice hoarse from the songs she sung to him, of sunlight and starlight and trees and gold and brave, brave princes and foolish, foolish elves who fell in love with them. She sung her heart out, poured it into the notes of ballads in Westron and Elvish-and when she only vaguely registers that it has been weeks, she pours into words of her own making, emotions barely strung together in language, for this is grief beyond measure, beyond sorrow, beyond anything she has felt before.

The reason that it does not beat ceaselessly against her is that it has already consumed her, a maelstrom whose deathly center she is slowly spiraling into, the pieces of her scattered beyond hope of reassembly, for she is broken beyond repair, dead in heart and soul if not in body, though she is sure that will come soon enough.

At first, she often has company in this lightless cavern, and they bring with them torches that are too bright for her losing eyes, a flame too familiar, too similar to the one within her that is guttering and flickering dangerously, naught but pathetic embers playing at an inferno, now. She has company and they mourn their own dead, some quiet and some loud.

If the tattooed Dwarrow, taller than the rest and twice as rough, sings what he explains is _his_ favorite song in a broken voice with her until she knows the words by what little heart she has left, she tells no one.

If another, a Dwarrowdam this time, shockingly similar to Thorin Oakenshield (she has spent so much time near his stone tomb that she feels she knows him, almost), yet there is so much of _him_ in her that she can only be his mother, who gifted him the runestone she ceaselessly runs her fingers over, cries when Tauriel presses it into her hand, and sings _his_ childhood lullaby, crooning in Khuzdul even as tears spill past her cheeks, Tauriel tells no one.

If one more, a Hobbit, stands silent each of three tombs of Durin’s Line, giving two a lingering look but pressing a kiss to the cold lips of another, and shedding no tears though he embraces her tightly as he leaves, does not cry, she does not tell a soul. For she knows that he was as close to Fading as a Hobbit could get, for a time, but he has turned out far stronger than she could ever hope to be-he will live a long life, in his land of rolling green hills and laughter like sunshine; he will not let himself be broken by this, though he will remember forever the love that changed his life.

And then she is alone in the darkness once more, the Arkenstone brighter than she can bear so she closes her eyes against the light, knowing that she will not open them again, and loses herself to her own memory.

She thinks of _him_ , delirious with fever, murmuring her name with a voice full of an ache, a longing that she would not have him know, had she a choice in the matter. She remembers the exact moment _he_ stopped breathing, because that was when her heart cracked so loud she could have sworn the terrible noise echoed through the entirety of Middle Earth. She remembers hating the color red, because there was far too much of it on her hands, and all of it his, and none of it stopping; she remembers that she cut her hair short with a knife, letting the jagged edge graze too close to her scalp in some places (she remembers Thranduil shearing it properly, evening edges out, right before telling her she was no longer welcome in the Mirkwood).

(She loses track of time, down there in the darkness with only her faltering breaths and erratic heartbeat to keep it; she lets it slip away from her, hours and minutes and perhaps days at a time.

There are no voices save those in her head.

Sometimes she thinks she hears _his_ voice from the statue, begging her to free him, but the strength has left her limbs, and though she beats against the cold, hard, _dead_ stone until her fists are bloody, it’s never enough)

Tauriel slips into a limbo between dreams and reality, a cruelty for when she veers too far into one, the swing back into the other is intimately painful. She dreams of walking in starlight, with _him_ alongside her, and they trace the constellations at their feet, rearranging them to tell their story. She remembers a bead braided into her hair-no, not just a bead, a promise-and gifts left in all corners of Erebor for her and her alone to find, and then a cottage amidst a sea of lush grass with no mountain in sight, but the great dome of the sky above them.

There is joy in that cottage, and every time she brushes against reality, though they grow far less frequent as time goes on, a part of her dies.

The skyline there splits in two sometimes, and the stars and stone pour forth in a molten rush, flooding the landscape entirely, the skies bleeding precious gems and pure light to form a path leading ever upwards into a realm of silence. Sometimes they follow it, and the only sound is _his_ heartbeat, leading her on, keeping her from straying off the path and plummeting to the ground that drops off into an abyss below.

Sometimes they do not, and it is just another night in their cottage, though the stars are strewn about the fields around them, and they will collect them and pin them back up in the morning, stitching them back into the tapestry-and sometimes they get the patterns wrong, but Tauriel thinks that they look better that way.

That way, every night is different.

(Tauriel has long lost her voice, blood stained her lips 1,600,558 heartbeats ago when she tried to sing and ended up coughing, harsh and wet, slick on the stone beneath her.

She hauls herself closer to _his_ tomb-she knows every inch of this cavern now, though she can no longer remember what light looks like, what the breeze in her hair and warmth on her back feels like.

Can no longer remember what the stars are, so long has she been within stone, within that field, walking among lamps silvered and shining, glimmering with something called memory, and something else called dreams.)

She knows it is her last breath as soon as she tastes the air in a rasped inhale, leaning to the side where the carved likeness of her Love is. There are so many things they have (not) done, did (not) get the chance to do.

She holds the exhale until she can bear it no longer, and seals her lips over Kíli’s statue, pushing the air out, and into him-and if she feels the statue’s chest move ever-so-slightly beneath her, she does not know if the final flutter within her breast is joy, despair, or her physical heart finally ceasing to beat.

_So open your eyes and see_

_The way our horizons meet_

_And all of the lights will lead_

_Into the night with me_

_(All of the Stars, Ed Sheeran)_

 


End file.
